Adele Ferguson

“ADELE, ok, I’m a coward because this is anonymous, but your redundant and duplicitous opposition to Obamacare cannot go unchallenged any longer. My signature will not be affixed to this note because I don’t feel a need for a continued debate on this issue. I just want you to know someone has caught on to your hypocrisy.

“Let me just say I do agree with you the basic framework of Obamacare is poor public health policy. You think it went too far. I don’t think it went far enough. I believe we should have a single payer system. The government should offer universal basic health care for everyone and adjust the revenues to pay for it. The insurance companies just suck up too much money for administration and profits.

“I essentially favor the Medicare system as model. You know, exactly the same system you have now. You contributed a de minimis amount for the benefit taken from your paychecks. However, the bulk of the benefits are paid from general federal tax revenues. It is one of those unsustainable entitlements your Republican buddies fuss about so often.

“SO HOW DO you dare denigrate efforts to bring health care for millions of uninsured when you yourself enjoy health care from the federal trough? You were wrong when you wrote Obamacare is “the biggest tax increase in U.S. history” when the Supreme Court said the mandate to buy health insurance is a tax. Allowing a federal income tax is probably the biggest constitutional tax increase in history.

“OK, I’m done. I’m a coward for not signing my name, but you are a hypocrite in the way you are handling the Obamacare matter and that can’t feel very good either.”

This “note” was longer but I tried to use the guts of it. I don’t know how I can be a hypocrite when I have been opposed to Obamacare since the Democrats slipped it though without any public hearings or debate despite the president’s campaign promise that any such actions would be shown over C-Span for the benefit of the public. He quickly signed it despite his other promise to read every line of every bill that crossed his desk.

I looked back to my most recent column on Obamacare, aka The Affordable Health Care Act, to see what I had written to set John Q. Anonymous off like this.

I had criticized Chief Justice John Roberts for recasting the bill as a tax despite the president’s persistent insistence that it was not. I said Democrats often cited the “millions” of people who had no health insurance but the D’s don’t mention that doesn’t mean they haven’t had health care. I doubted that few Americans did not know that you can go to a hospital emergency room and be treated without having to pay for it. There’s a law that requires that. And the impetus for health care reform was the ever rising cost of treating all these freebies.

I ALSO DOUBTED many of the Democrats who voted for it knew what was in it. They didn’t need to. This was to be the signature piece of his legacy for his first term and they better by God deliver.

Only recently have we learned that $716 billion was cut out of Medicare funding to pay for the cost of implementing Obamacare. And Obamacare calls for a group of 15 individuals to make decisions on what medical services will have to be cut to make up for the loss of that money. Remember when Democrats were rejecting accusations that Obamacare would have a “death panel” for deciding who was worth saving so old folks were expected to have a tough time getting an OK if they became expensive?

I called Obamacare a Pandora’s box, the legendary box in which Zeus locked all the human ills of the world which got out when she opened it. Welcome to Obamacare.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville. Wa., 98340.)